Sherif Marakby, CEO, Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC: “We are planning to accommodate vehicles that can have goods or they can have people.”

On the streets of Miami this fall, Ford Motor Co.'s teams developing autonomous vehicles learned a few lessons about how users interact with self-driving vehicles for passenger service and delivery of goods.

Not everyone, for example, is comfortable leaving a high-rise apartment building and walking down to the curb to pick up a pizza being delivered by a vehicle with no driver, said Sherif Marakby, CEO of Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC.

Outlook 2019

What some of the most interesting, influential and well-connected people in Michigan have to say about the outlook for the year ahead. Read our special report.

"We learned a lot from that from people who are experiencing the service," Marakby said. "We also learned a lot ourselves about what to deliver, how to deliver it, when to deliver, what are the challenges — and that's all different than anything we've done before."

In other words, Ford isn't designing and building vehicles that customers just jump into to run errands. They're designing vehicles that run the errands for customers — and that's exposing a whole new set of challenges that Ford employees are navigating inside a 111-year-old one-time hosiery factory in Detroit's oldest neighborhood.

Marakby's team took lessons learned in Miami back to their new office space in Corktown known as The Factory, where they're in a race with other automakers to get autonomous vehicle passenger and delivery service ready for mass service in U.S. cities by 2021.

Ford's teams developing the strategy and user experience for autonomous and electric vehicles made a big move in 2018 from traditional corporate office space in Dearborn to The Factory, the automaker's first building in Corktown in what will become a 1.2 million-square-foot campus anchored by the Michigan Central Station by 2022.

At The Factory, Ford's computer engineers and strategists are building high-definition mapping for the artificial intelligence platform Argo AI LLC that will propel the still-unannounced vehicle the automaker plans to deploy at scale in three years for both ride-hailing and delivering goods.

The automaker has completed more than 1,000 test deliveries for Postmates and Walmart for autonomous grocery delivery as well as Ann Arbor-based Domino's Pizza for pizza delivery. The early testing is helping Ford's AV team flesh out what combinations of passengers and freight may not be compatible, such as humans and hot pizza, Marakby said.

"We're working to figure that out. We clearly want the best service for the autonomous service. Hopefully that will not happen, where we have (a passenger) with a pizza in the back. But we are planning to accommodate vehicles that can have goods or they can have people. Obviously we have to be careful what we have in those vehicles so that we can get the best service for people that are in that car. ... And we're figuring out what goods we're going to deliver and what goods we're not going to deliver."